Writing without spelling

For ten years, Lin Yung-hsiung has been sitting at his desk in Taiwan. Her little hand holds a thin toothbrush with bamboo handles, almost straight up and down. Carefully draw black dots on your paper. Millions of other children in eastern cities and towns do the same thing every day. What are you doing? Do you paint pictures for an art class?

The answer is yes and no at the same time. Children learn the art of writing without spelling. It is an art that dates back to the Shang Dynasty in China, about 3000 years or more.

But how do you spell without spelling? Let us illustrate with the name of the child mentioned above. In Mandarin, her last name is Lin. The character of this [illustration - Chinese characters] means "forest" or "forest". Can you see the two trees that convey the idea? His name, Yung-hsiung, consists of two characters [works of art - Chinese characters] meaning something like "permanent value" or "eternal masculinity".

But when the signs reveal the meaning, they do not spell the pronunciation of the word. The reader should explore the word according to the type of Chinese he speaks. For example, a Cantonese-speaking person whose name is written with the same sign as the previous paragraph would pronounce the name, not Lin Yung-hsiung but Lam Wing-hung. But the meaning would be the same in both cases. Anyone who reads Chinese can communicate in writing, even if someone who speaks a dialect may not understand the language that another speaks.

Efforts to market Mandarin

Efforts have recently been made to make Mandarin the language spoken throughout China. To facilitate this, experts have formulated so-called national phonetic symbols, a series of thirty-seven symbols that can accurately spell the pronunciation of Chinese characters in Mandarin. These phonetic symbols are used to teach Mandarin pronunciation. In addition to characters, they are also used in publications aimed at children and people with little education. This allows them to read without knowing thousands of complicated characters.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a second campaign has once again reached written Chinese. For example? 'Or what? In the last eighteen centuries, Wenyen-style Chinese writing has emerged. It is a very concise writing method with a single monosyllabic character for each word. A person reading these monosyllabic words would be misunderstood. To illustrate the problem, the character "loyal" chung1 is pronounced in Mandarin. But this number can also mean "medium", "clock", "good" or other things. English has similar examples of words that sound the same but have different meanings, such as B. "naked" and "bear", "article" and "dress".

In conversation, a Chinese person generally overcomes this problem by adding an extra syllable in certain words to give the listener the exact shadow of the meaning. For example, if a Mandarin speaker speaks instead of using a single character for "loyal" (chung1), he says chung1-hsin1 and adds an extra syllable (hsin1) so that the audience knows he meant "loyal". instead of "medium", "clock" or something else. The Paihua method adds additional syllables to the script, making it resemble everyday speech, which is what the term Paihua means. This makes reading much more understandable for people with less education. These campaigns to use phonetic symbols to teach Mandarin pronunciation and the Paihua principles of Chinese writing have encouraged many people to learn to read and speak Mandarin.

Write without spelling

Writing Chinese characters is an art. A teacher must first learn the correct order of combat. Balance and proportions are also needed. Use small squares of paper to help beginners. Our young friend Yung-hsiung practiced for the first time on square paper with a pen or pencil. Finally, he developed the ability to write a character that contained up to thirty-three beats in a small square. Later, Yung-hsiung mastered the art of writing characters with a brush.

Writing without spelling is a problem. But the Chinese have developed ingenious ways of dealing with them. It's interesting how Yung-hsiung finds names in a phone book. Since Chinese has no alphabet, the names are listed by the number of hyphens used to write the first character in the name, which in Chinese is the last name or surname. The first step in finding the name is to write the character and count the hyphens as you do so. Yung-hsiung's own surname, Lin, requires eight strokes; then he finds it in the eight bar catalog.

And the relationship between Chinese and Japanese? In fact, the two languages ​​are not closely related. Japanese grammar and sentence construction are completely different from Chinese. Still, the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their language.

The loan of Chinese characters to the Japanese produced one of the most complicated forms of writing in the world. Since all Chinese characters in Japanese are pronounced in Chinese and Japanese, some can be read in up to nine or more different ways, depending on the context. And while Japanese students can handle about 1,850 basic Chinese characters, they also have to master two different phonetic methods to write the forty-eight basic Japanese sounds. And that's not all. To complicate things, it is necessary to read Japanese to familiarize yourself with tens of thousands of different combinations of two or more characters to know their correct pronunciation in different settings.

The Chinese system of writing without spelling is really a complicated art. But its value to the human family has been great, as the Chinese script allows nearly 800 million people who speak different Chinese dialects to communicate clearly with each other.